All other parts of the temple may be entered, but slavery is the ark of the covenant, and whoso lays his profane hands thereon must perish.

How comes it to pass that this should be done, not in the despotisms of Austria and of Russia, but in republican America?

Almighty God has so constituted the human soul, that while wrong exists upon the face of the earth, all the noblest impulses of that soul will war against it.

Discussion, or agitation, if you so please to call it, is one of the Heaven-appointed means by which truth is to be spread until it covers the face of the earth, as the waters cover the sea.

It was by discussion and by agitation, in synagogue and in temple, in distant cities and in different empires, that Christianity was carried from its cradle in Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.

It is because SLAVERY has existed among men; and Christianity never will and never can pervade the earth until the barriers of slavery are first overthrown.

Where was there ever written or published a more incendiary and fanatical document than the Declaration of Independence?--a torch to set the world on fire.

In the present century, what but discussion and agitation, through all the realms of Great Britain and in this country, could have sufficed to extinguish the slave trade,--that foulest blot upon modern civilization?

No, sir; agitation is a part of the sublime order of nature.

They furnished another argument for those who despair of human nature; and they supply the misanthrope with a plausible reason for hating mankind.

They affixed another stain upon the country, and set in deeper shade the contrast between the theory of our government and its practice.

They belied still another time the gospel of love and human brotherhood.

In this sense only do I accept the President’s declaration, that the action of the last Congress on this subject is to be deemed final;--that, in all future conflicts, the right shall not be trampled under foot, but the victims of…

Base as human nature often proves itself to be, it sometimes manifests a divine resilience by which it springs with recuperative energy from its guilty fall.

It has been said by the Secretary of State, in a late speech, that if this subject be reöpened in Congress, the friends of freedom will be found in a “lean and miserable minority.” What cares my conscience, sir, whether I am in a minority…

Has any great and glorious cause ever been started upon earth, that did not find itself, at the outset, in a minority?

Did Clarkson and Wilberforce open their twenty years’ contest with a majority? or were not all the office-seekers and mammon-worshippers opposed to them?

Did the resistance of the revolutionary patriots to the government of Great Britain start with a majority on its side?

Did the Pilgrim fathers resist conformity to ecclesiastical oppression because they were a majority of the people?

Did the glorious band of reformers count on majorities, when they defied the racks and the flames of Rome?

What would now be our condition if the prophets and heroes of olden days, if the warriors for truth and the martyrs of liberty, all over the earth, had yielded to so base an argument as this, and had followed the multitude to do evil…

It is to make them labor for the right with a zeal commensurate with the infinite baseness of the appeal by which they are urged to abandon it.

I object, then, to the law as a departure from the constitution,--not a departure towards despotism merely, but into despotism.

But if we gather the opinions of disinterested and unbiased men; of those who have no money to make or office to hope for through the triumph of the law, then I think the preponderance of opinion is decidedly the other way.

That reply is, that on a great moral and political, as well as legal question,--a question that connects itself with ethics, as well as with partisan politics, and the success of old parties or the formation of new ones,--integrity is as…